Principal Technical Project Manager

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Principal Technical Project Manager

Department: Project Management

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Bristol, UK

Compensation: GBP 70,000 - GBP 80,000 / year

Description

We're building the next UK-headquartered engineering powerhouse.

There is a gulf between the needs of mission-focused organisations and the development and delivery of the critical technology they rely on. The consequences of this are felt acutely by underserved frontline operators, demanding a new breed of engineering enterprise to bridge this divide.

Rowden exists to meet this need. We design and build systems, infrastructure, and applications to deliver mission advantage to those working to protect the security of the UK and its allies. Rowden is setting a new standard in government technology provision: hyper-efficient engineering, better customer relationships, and rapid assimilation of commercial technology.

As a Principal Technical Project Manager, you're not just a manager; you're the leader of our most challenging and impactful land networks systems integration projects. You'll take the helm, lead diverse teams, collaborate with technical experts, and champion the end-to-end integration of our edge networked systems. In this role you'll need to embrace the accountability for project delivery, working closely alongside a Technical Lead and reporting to the General Manager.

You don't need to be an engineer by trade, but to succeed in the role you'll need to have a solid technical grounding through experience, and you'll need to be curious and engaged about the detail of the work that we're undertaking. While you might not be able to conduct a code review or write a functional requirements spec, you shouldn't wavetop over all the intricacies involved in delivery and should be comfortable talking in reasonable depth with engineering discipline leads about issues relevant to your project. There will be ample opportunity to work with experts in their fields and learn about new technologies along the way.

In addition to your project leadership responsibility, you will be able to use your experience to influence the day-to-day operation and strategic direction of the Operating Unit, as well as driving forward business initiatives such as streamlining and scaling our overall delivery approach, working closely with the General Manager.

Key areas of responsibility

As one of Rowden's Principal Technical Project Managers, you will be responsible for:

Project Accountability and Strategic Support:

• Providing technical project management for land networks systems integration projects, ensuring they are on time, to budget, whilst keeping our end users at the forefront of our decisions.
• Acting as the day-to-day leader of the project (alongside the Technical Lead), with our internal team, execs, partners, and customers. You will also provide support to the General Manager in strategic customer meetings.
• You support the General Manager in the strategic planning and direction of the Operating Unit.
• You support the General Manager in their day-to-day responsibilities, attending key forums and communication sessions to build and maintain capacity.
• We're scaling and growing fast. Whilst being the project leader, you will be required to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in amongst it. We are not looking for High level Programme Management for this role. This is first and foremost a project management role.

Project Control and Delivery:

• Leading internal and external steering meetings to elicit decisions, confirm direction and mitigate risk.
• Delivering key project performance reports to our Customers, General Manager and the Head of Project Management.
• Maintaining and owning a comprehensive view of budget, forecast and actuals against your project and brokering key financial decisions with the General Manager and Chief Financial Officer.
• Engaging with and developing strong relationship with key suppliers and contractors to support project delivery.
• Developing and owning comprehensive project plans with your technical team that are monitored and updated regularly. Be able to translate a complex plan into digestible views for different audiences.
• Actively managing project risks and have it at the forefront of decision making. No dusty risk logs here.
• You'll leverage your background in working within regulated environments to ensure projects adhere to industry standards and compliance requirements.
• Enacting a slimline change process to effectively broker time, cost and spec with the Technical Lead.

Scoping & Mobilisation:

• Be the rocket behind mobilising our delivery teams upon contract award. You will be involved in the solution development ahead of contract award and should decide what should be actioned quickly to get the project moving at pace.
• You will work alongside a Solution Architect and Engagement Manager on new bids and opportunities, to ensure we are scoping deliverable solutions.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

We are looking for someone who is passionate about technology and who actively invests in their technical skills and abilities. You'll gain loads of experience in this role but before you do, you should have:

• Held leadership positions on multi-year, multimillion-pound projects.
• Demonstrated end-to-end leadership of projects.
• Experience in a regulated environment, preferably in the Defence sector.
• Been customer facing and can navigate your way through a complex set of stakeholders.
• Experience of and proficient in initiating and planning projects, considering the unique challenges of complex engineering systems within a regulated environment.
• Proven success in leading and managing large teams of 20+ multidisciplinary professionals.
• A technical background with a solid understanding of systems engineering, product development and engineering lifecycles.
• Experience working with supply chain functions, preferably working closely with those procuring hardware.
• Experience with executive level communication and presentations.
• Experience in proactively identifying and planning for project risks, mitigation planning and escalation.
• Strong analytical thinking skills, demonstrated through the development of compelling and persuasive business cases.
• Competence in Jira, Microsoft Project, Excel, and task tracking software.

About you:

The ideal candidate will have a strong balance of technical skills and experience, and the behavioral competencies that we believe are key to success in the role are as follows:

• You will be a critical analyst. You will scrutinise the information you receive and ask the necessary questions to ensure that you fully understand the impact.
• You will take initiative and will be able to make decisions under pressure by asking the right questions upfront.
• You will play well with others and exhibit strong interpersonal skills.
• You will cope with uncertainty. Ideally, you'll have demonstratable experience developing and delivering initiatives within an SME/Scaleup.
• You will be humble; you'll be open with the team where you are not an expert and ask for help and advice.
• You'll be tenacious and hungry, and able to bounce back from project setbacks.
• You'll be obsessed with attention to detail, focussing yourself and your project teams on quality standards.

Working at Rowden

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!

We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.

Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.

Finally, if you feel that you don't meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we'd still love to hear from you!